Someone Else’s Road Trip

This is our Christmas card photo. Shawnee State Park in Bedford County. A Gaffron family favorite.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike passes Shawnee. So does Route 30 – the Lincoln Highway. And Route 31. I used to hear the purr of late night traffic from my parents’ campsite.

Did you ever travel this part of PA? The part where you rise and fall through the Laurel Highlands? On the way to your next adventure, your do-over, your quest to make a living, your requisite family visit?

Maybe I heard you on summer nights, from my sleeping bag. As you coursed down a mountain in the dark. As you took on the next summit. And the next. “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can . . .”

Here’s some things about Shawnee:

I watched eagles and blue heron from this lake.

This is what the summit above Shawnee looks like after a thunderstorm.

There are spots on this lake where, when the sky is just right, you can see a castle on a hill. Usually framed by clouds. No, you didn’t just row into Brigadoon. This is the remains of Story Land on Route 30.

This violence took place down the read.

My parents camped here with their own families before they met each other years later in Pittsburgh.

Also, my family and I travelled past Shawnee many, many times for the same reasons that you have.

***** Postscript:

I spent my first years living near Harrisburg, and almost everyone from both sides of my family stayed in the Pittsburgh area. So every major holiday meant a trip from Central PA to Western PA and back again. I thought that the song “Over the River and Through the Woods” was written specifically for us.

We built the family folklore on these journeys.

Like the time that Hardee’s in Breezewood burned down right before our Christmas trip past it. We mourned the loss of our favorite restaurant. Then it rose from the ashes before our Easter trip.

Or the drive home from my aunt’s house in Greensburg. Route 30 was so icy coming down the mountain into Jennerstown that my parents made us sit over the wheels to provide traction.

Or the time that cows ran down the turnpike after a livestock truck crashed.

Or the time that we saw somebody else’s Christmas presents on the side of the road for miles.

This week some of my in-laws will head east on their trip to Maryland. Some of my own parents will do likewise to visit my sister in Eastern PA.  I will go to Somerset for one day. The holidays make me think of everyone climbing up and down my Allegheny Mountains (yes, I do think of them as my mountains), and I wish them all a safe journey.